Along with the advance of the digital computer technology, even in office devices and general home appliances which have simple functions and cannot be organically connected to each other, functions such as connection of these devices, cooperation of processes, and the like can be implemented via a network. In order to connect a plurality of devices to each other via a network and to attain data transfer and operation control, a device control protocol is required. Device control protocols with various specifications have been proposed.
Office devices and home electronic appliances can be controlled via a network. As a result, device control applications which appropriately remotely control these devices to add new values continue to come on the market.
When a plurality of device control protocols of different types are used together, a device control application must individually support these device control protocols. As a technique that weakens coupling between such device control application processes and device control protocol processes, a prior art disclosed in, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-306416 is known. In this prior art, even when there are differences depending on different vendors and versions (e.g., different communication protocols, different axial configurations of robots, and the like), common application software can be developed by simple replacement of processing commands.
However, in the aforementioned device control protocols, various specifications and proposals are available. That is, in device control protocols, specifications and bylaws are specified in correspondence with the types of devices to be controlled and the contents of expected cooperation processes. For this reason, with increasing number of classes of devices having cooperation functions via a network, the number of types of device control protocols increases. On the other hand, as shown in FIG. 10, since a device control application 101 and device 102 to be controlled are directly connected via a device control protocol 103, if the number of classes of devices to be controlled increases, the device control application must individually support a plurality of device control protocols.